Regenerative agriculture improves soil health, and some of its advocates say widespread adoption of this type of farming could solve the climate crisis and fix numerous problems in the food system. | Corinna Kern via Getty Images
On Tuesday, a pair of documentaries landed on Amazon Prime that put forth a rather bold claim: By simply making a few tweaks to how we farm, humanity can reverse climate change and all but eliminate a host of other problems stemming from our modern food system.
The two films — Kiss the Ground, which first came out on Netflix in 2020, and its follow-up, Common Ground, which premiered on streaming this week — are the most high-profile documentaries advocating for a widespread shift to “regenerative agriculture.”
This organic-adjacent approach to agriculture focuses on using a few farming methods to improve soil health, which has been degraded over the last century in large part due to the industrialization of agriculture, with its bevy of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Deployed at scale, the films argue, regenerative agriculture would improve soil health so greatly that farmers around the globe could draw down massive amounts of climate-warming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them in soil, largely solving the climate crisis.
“By converting our farmland to regenerative agriculture, the soil could sequester all of the carbon dioxide that humanity emits each year,” actor Jason Momoa claims in Common Ground. “That would bring our carbon emissions to net zero. In other words, our planet’s soil could help stabilize our climate.”
Regenerative agriculture, according to the films, could also boost biodiversity, enrich struggling farmers, clean up polluted waterways, and end the “human health crisis.” (It’s unclear which human health crisis they mean.)
This straightforward, all-encompassing plan to fix some of the world’s most wicked problems has been embraced by an eclectic set of US policymakers, A-list actors, celebrity doctors, and leading environmental organizations. (The films collectively also feature Rosario Dawson, Tom Brady, Laura Dern, and Donald Glover, among others.)
When Kiss the Ground was released, its sweeping claims drew criticism as overly simplistic and scientifically dubious — a kind of “magical thinking,” as one environmental scientist put it in a review of Kiss the Ground in the journal Biogeochemistry. The films feature no critics or skeptics, only fervent supporters.
Regenerative agriculture practices certainly have some environmental and social benefits. But the films engage in a kind of nostalgic utopianism, asserting that if it weren’t for greedy corporations and subservient lawmakers, we could go back to the old ways of farming, which would heal our broken relationship with nature and usher in a healthier future with a stable climate.
In Kiss the Ground, actor-narrator Ian Somerhalder goes so far as to say that regenerative agriculture would “get the Earth back to the Garden of Eden that it once was.” Unfortunately, it’s not so simple.
The benefits — and limits — of regenerative agriculture
Our food and farming system is, no doubt, in need of significant reform.
It’s America’s largest source of water pollution and animal suffering and accounts for more than 10 percent of our carbon footprint. Many farmers overapply synthetic fertilizer to their crops, and federal regulators have been captured by corporations that wield enormous power in politics. Many large farmers turn a handsome profit thanks to nonsensical subsidies while small and midsized operations struggle to stay afloat in US agriculture’s “get big or get out” model. Farmworkers are treated as invisible cogs in a machine that pumps out unhealthy food.
The documentaries do a fine enough job cataloguing these problems, though at times they can be misleading and alarmist. For example, there’s no proof that the world has only 60 harvests remaining, as actor Woody Harrelson narrates in Kiss the Ground. Interview subjects, including supermodel Gisele Bündchen, repeatedly claim that healthier soils lead to healthier food, and thus healthier humans, though the science isn’t clear on how much soil health affects food’s nutrient content.
So, what exactly is regenerative agriculture? There’s no universal definition, but it boils down to a few key practices and goals:
Drastically reduce or eliminate synthetic chemicals: Modern farmers routinely douse crops in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Significantly reducing or eliminating these chemicals can improve soil health, boost biodiversity, and reduce water pollution.
Eliminate tillage: Most farmers till, or disturb, their soil to get rid of weeds and make the soil more porous, among other things. But tillage can also release carbon dioxide stored in the soil and harm overall soil health, so regenerative farmers swear against it.
Plant cover crops: Regenerative farmers plant “cover crops,” like clover and rye, around fall harvest time, which improves soil health in a number of ways.
Rotational grazing: “When cattle are left to their own devices on pasture, they overgraze — trampling on and eroding the soil, and destroying vegetation,” as I wrote last year. “But regenerative ranchers use rotational grazing…which entails periodically moving cattle between plots of land. This can help prevent overgrazing because vegetation is given time to regrow, resulting in healthier soil that [regenerative] advocates say can sequester large amounts of carbon.”
All of these practices have proven ecological benefits, and US regulators would be wise to incentivize more farmers to take them up. But agriculture, like other environmentally sensitive industries, is rife with tradeoffs, which Kiss the Ground and Common Ground entirely ignore.
For example, while chemical-laden agriculture has many drawbacks, it typically produces more food per acre, which means it requires less land. The same goes for conventionally raised cattle: grass-finished, regeneratively raised cattle require between two and two-and-a-half times more land than those finished on feedlots.
A nationwide shift to regenerative agriculture would massively increase demand for land — a critical downside to this style of farming. Agriculture is already extremely land-intensive, using up some 40 percent of US land, and each acre that can be spared from farming is an acre that can remain as habitat for wildlife.
Then there is the claim that healthier soil can draw down enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in farmland. Done on a large scale, the films say, regenerative agriculture could even draw down all the carbon dioxide humans emit each year.
But this is highly improbable, as scientists don’t even have accurate and affordable tools to measure how much carbon regenerative farms can sequester. No-till farming likely doesn’t sequester much carbon, and if a farmer decides to eventually till that soil, a lot of the carbon they’d stored up would be released. The rate at which farmland can sequester carbon also diminishes over time.
And while rotationally grazing cattle has the potential to sequester some of the enormous amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cattle, it’s far from all of a beef cattle’s emissions, as one source in Kiss the Ground suggests. Beef, whether produced regeneratively or not, is still the world’s most carbon-intensive food.
Meanwhile, the films fail to acknowledge the most effective approach to slashing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, which accounts for up to one-third of global emissions. According to a survey of more than 200 climate and agriculture experts, the best way to do that is to reduce meat and dairy production. (These same experts rated carbon sequestration as one of the least effective approaches.) Reducing meat and milk intake in rich countries like the US would also reduce land demand, water pollution, and animal suffering, and likely improve human health.
Despite the undisputed benefits of regenerative agriculture, Kiss the Ground and Common Ground misleadingly promote it as one weird trick that farmers everywhere can deploy to heal the planet and humanity. It uses a cast of celebrities, advocate-experts, and farmers who employ simplistic arguments and visuals to avoid the nuanced and difficult tradeoffs of agricultural production.
Yet the grandiose claims made in these films have managed to gain serious traction in environmental and agricultural policy circles, often crowding out more evidence-based solutions.
You’ll find a decent analysis of what’s wrong with our food system, and plenty of hope on how to fix it, in these films. But when the solution to problems as complex as climate change, diet-related chronic disease, farmer debt, mass pollution, and biodiversity collapse is as simple as a few changes to how we farm, whoever’s promoting it is probably standing on shaky ground.
